I have several blogs hosted by 1and1.com. I have been adding some plugins and kept coming across 500 Internal Server Error. I went back and forth, activating plugins, deactivating plugins and deleting them off of the FTP server. I was also coming across the WordPress blank screen on my admin dashboard. It was getting very frustrating. Then I came across something about one of the plugins generating the 500 Internal Server Error when the hosting company was not using PHP5. So I did some research into 1and1.com with WordPress and found a solution.

Find your .HTACCESS file on your server. It is a hidden file so make sure your FTP client (I use filezilla) can view hidden files. Open up the file in your text editor and add the following line after the line # END WORDPRESS.

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

That’s it. Since I added this line I have not had an error 500 and all of my screens in WordPress have not been blank. Note: I did have one time when a plugin rewrote the .HTACCESS file. So keep a copy of the file handy. If you come across the error 500, just copy your backup of this file onto your FTP server.

*******UPDATE****** Since writing this post 1and1.com had made it easier to make this change. Simply login to your customer account. Look for the Web Space area and click on Global PHP Version. Select PHP5 from the pull down menu and click Save. That’s it. For those of you who are not on 1and1.com the original posting above should work as well.

I have found some other benefits of this fix. For example, on plugins, the automated updates were a hit and miss for actually doing the update. Now they work every time. Also, the Admin. dashboard would pick and choose what sections to show. Now it shows everthing.

I already have this entry and I still get the 500 error. Never had it before I installed drupal into a completely different folder on the server. Even if I remove all the changes I made when installing drupal, the 500 error still persists.

Make sure that the edit is after the # END WORDPRESS, otherwise each time you upate a plugin, it could remove or change the line added. The other thing to try is deactivate all of your plugins and then reactivate one-by-one to see if there is a corupt plugin.

If you continue to have the errors, you may need to do a clean install of WordPress.

I get this recurring problem with my wordpress blogs. You find a couple of ‘ss’ at the end of the code or the code is repeated ad infinitum.

I’m hosted at Hostgator and they told me it was a bug in the wordpress that keeps doing this. Up till now I have done as you have said and just pasted the htaccess with the correct code. I’ll try this extra line.

Thank you very much! I was going crazy trying to find out why my plugins were blowing up wordpress. I thought I was going to have to completely change my theme, but you saved the day with this solution.

You are, quite frankly, an answer to prayer. I spent hours checking if I had all the right updated versions of everything, then loading and reloading my ftp, and trying to activate plugins in different orders. Always that dreaded 500 error. Now it works!!! I never would’ve thought of contacting 1and1 on this, sure that it was probably my user error. Thank you!

Well, in fact it worked one time lol.
With another website, I got the same problem and it didn’t solve it so the only thing to do then is to suppress your wordpress folder and re-install.
It worked for me 😉

This solution is specifically for WordPress blogs on 1and1.com. I am not familiar with asp.net. However, you could try adding the text and see what happens, but only if you are running on 1and1.com. As for using notepad, you can use that as long as the file is saved in with the same name and no extension. I use FileZilla as my FTP client and notepad++ as the editor.

As much as I want this to work, I believe this solution only fixes the
problem coincidentally. I can’t prove it, but I think both the solution
of upping memory limit in php.ini and the solution of adding a handler
for PHP5 in .htaccess are non-starters. I do know that I have BOTH solutions
in place and my sites still get the 500 error quite often.

I spent 4 hours trying to upgrade a client’s site from wordpress 2.9.2 to wordpress 3.05 and half of his plugins were causing internal server errors on activation, or blank admin pages. As soon as I added this to .htaccess it solved the problem.